Monthly Archives: September 2012

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BSA: EU cloud uptake lower than global average

Highest number of cloud users in Romania and Greece, according to research

Research from software advocates Business Software Alliance (BSA) has inferred a surprising lack of cloud usage among European Union computer users.

The figures, surveying 4000 people, showed that across the EU, whilst 86% of respondents used cloud services for personal use, less than a third (29%) used it for business purposes.

Greece and Romania had the most cloud users with 39%, higher than the global average of 24%, with Poland (25%), the UK (21%) and Austria (20%) making up the top five.

The most popular responses to the question “What type of online cloud computing services have you used?” were:

  • Email service (79%), compared to a global figure of 78%
  • Online word processing aligned with 36% of EU consumers (45% global numbers)
  • Photo storage and online games came joint third (35%) with European computer users

The global figures …

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Mimecast Signs Over 50 New Legal Customers in Six Months

Mimecast, a supplier of cloud-based email archiving, security and continuity for Microsoft Exchange and Office 365, today announced that it now works with 70 of the top 100 legal firms in the UK and around 130 of the top 200.
Recent additions to Mimecast’s portfolio of legal customers include SJ Berwin, Foot Anstey, Kingsley Napley, Weightmans and Russell Cooke.
Mimecast has signed up 50 new law firms in the last six months and also significantly increased its market presence in UK chambers, with over 25 now Mimecast customers. The Bar Council of England and Wales are one of the latest to use Mimecast’s services for security and long-term archiving.

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Deutsche Telekom to Push Out De-Mail

Deutsche Telekom is set to launch the long-awaited secure, legally binding – and paid – e-mail system known as De-Mail throughout Germany on August 31.
“De-Mail brings us a step closer to the gigabit society,” Telekom CEO René Obermann said.
Deutsche Telekom and other De-Mail peddlers mean to use the widgetry to put Deutsche Post and other conventional mail carriers out of business.
It says 17.5 billion pieces of mail are sent a year in Germany, 90% of it business mail, and much of it can be done electronically.
It expects De-Mail, which was developed at the instigation of the Federal Ministry of the Interior, to become the standard in the next few years, replacing 29% of the 17.5 billion letters and 39% of the 3 5.4 billion faxes sent a year in Germany by 2018.

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IDC Cuts PC Forecast

IDC has cut its prediction of PC growth this year from 5% to 0.9% or about 367 million units.
It will be the second consecutive year of growth below 2%. The researcher figures US shipments will drop 3.7%.
Dell last week reported quarterly sales off 14% year-over-year, HP was down 10%.
It remains to be seen if Windows 8 makes a difference. It arrives October 26 to a “more competitive environment” and consumers confused by the new products. Merchants have cut prices – well, they are trying to clear Windows 7 inventory – but IDC says the back-to-school season is pretty much a bust.
Longer term it estimates worldwide shipments (think emerging markets, notebooks and Ultrabooks) will work out to about 6.5% in 2013, 7% in 2014 and 7.1% in 2015.

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No Verdict Gratification for Apple Till December 6

Apple may have to wait until December 6 to see if it gets any gratification from the jury decision last week that Samsung copied its technology in its phones, which it wants enjoined.
The delay is supposed to have something to do with the flood of post-trial filings the judge is expecting from both sides, but it certainly takes the teeth out of the victory as the product grow increasingly dated.
“Having considered the scope of Apple’s preliminary injunction request, the additional post-trial motions that the parties have already filed and will file, and the substantial overlap between the analysis required for Apple’s preliminary injunction motion and the parties’ various other post-trial motions, the court believes consolidation of the briefing and hearing on the post-trial motions is appropriate,” the judge said.

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No Verdict Gratification for Apple Till December 6

Apple may have to wait until December 6 to see if it gets any gratification from the jury decision last week that Samsung copied its technology in its phones, which it wants enjoined.
The delay is supposed to have something to do with the flood of post-trial filings the judge is expecting from both sides, but it certainly takes the teeth out of the victory as the product grow increasingly dated.
“Having considered the scope of Apple’s preliminary injunction request, the additional post-trial motions that the parties have already filed and will file, and the substantial overlap between the analysis required for Apple’s preliminary injunction motion and the parties’ various other post-trial motions, the court believes consolidation of the briefing and hearing on the post-trial motions is appropriate,” the judge said.

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Data center

Cloud Isn’t Social, It’s Business

Adopting a cloud-oriented business model for IT is imperative to successfully transforming the data center to realize ITaaS.

Much like devops is more about a culture shift than the technology enabling it, cloud is as much or more about shifts in business models as it is technology. Even as service providers (that includes cloud providers) need to look toward a business model based on revenue per application (as opposed to revenue per user) enterprise organizations need to look hard at their business model as they begin to move toward a more cloud-oriented deployment model.

While many IT organizations have long since adopted a “service oriented” approach, this approach has focused on the customer, i.e. a department, a business unit, a project. This approach is not wholly compatible with a cloud-based approach, as the “tenant” of most enterprise (private) cloud implementations is an application, not a business entity. As a “provider of services”, IT should consider adopting a more service provider business model view, with subscribers mapping to applications and services mapping to infrastructure services such as rate shaping, caching, access control, and optimization.

By segmenting IT into services, IT can not only more effectively transition toward the goal of ITaaS, but realize additional benefits for both business and operations.

A service subscription business model:

  • Makes it easier to project costs across entire infrastructure
    Because functionality is provisioned as services, it can more easily be charged for on a pay-per-use model. Business stakeholders can clearly estimate the costs based on usage for not just application infrastructure, but network infrastructure, as well, providing management and executives with a clearer view of what actual operating costs are for given projects, and enabling them to essentially line item veto services based on projected value added to the business by the project.
  • Easier to justify cost of infrastructure
    Having a detailed set of usage metrics over time makes it easier to justify investment in upgrades or new infrastructure, as it clearly shows how cost is shared across operations and the business. Being able to project usage by applications means being able to tie services to projects in earlier phases and clearly show value added to management. Such metrics also make it easier to calculate the cost per transaction (the overhead, which ultimately reduces profit margins) so that business can understand what’s working and what’s not.
  • Enables business to manage costs over time 
    Instituting a “fee per hour” enables business customers greater flexibility in costing, as some applications may only use services during business hours and only require them to be active during that time. IT that adopts such a business model will not only encourage business stakeholders to take advantage of such functionality, but will offer more awareness of the costs associated with infrastructure services and enable stakeholders to be more critical of what’s really needed versus what’s not.
  • Easier to start up a project/application and ramp up over time as associated revenue increases
    Projects assigned limited budgets that project revenue gains over time can ramp up services that enhance performance or delivery options as revenue increases, more in line with how green field start-up projects manage growth. If IT operations is service-based, then projects can rely on IT for service deployment in an agile fashion, added new services rapidly to keep up with demand or, if predictions fail to come to fruition, removing services to keep the project in-line with budgets.
  • Enables consistent comparison with off-premise cloud computing
    A service-subscription model also provides a more compatible business model for migrating workloads to off-premise cloud environments – and vice-versa. By tying applications to services – not solutions – the end result is a better view of the financial costs (or savings) of migrating outward or inward, as costs can be more accurately determined based on services required.

The concept remains the same as it did in 2009: infrastructure as a service gives business and application stakeholders the ability to provision and eliminate services rapidly in response to budgetary constraints as well as demand.

That’s cloud, in a nutshell, from a technological point of view. While IT has grasped the advantages of such technology and its promised benefits in terms of efficiency it hasn’t necessarily taken the next step and realized the business model has a great deal to offer IT as well.

One of the more common complaints about IT is its inability to prove its value to the business. Taking a service-oriented approach to the business and tying those services to applications allows IT to prove its value and costs very clearly through usage metrics. Whether actual charges are incurred or not is not necessarily the point, it’s the ability to clearly associate specific costs with delivering specific applications that makes the model a boon for IT.

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Cloud Computing: VMware Kills Off Its Loathed vRAM Pricing

Pat Gelsinger, the Intel honcho who went to EMC as president a few years ago, enters into office as CEO of VMware, replacing Paul Maritz, a hero to his customers.
He’s dumping VMware’s hated vRAM pricing established a year ago when vSphere 5 rolled out. vSphere licenses were priced by how much virtual memory each virtual machine used. Licenses came with RAM “entitlements” and users would pay for how much RAM they used over that quota.
It was complicated and expensive, more expensive than VMware used to be on the same machines because users had to buy more licenses. Rivals, which VMware thought would follow suit, were astonished and customers were ticked off. Microsoft called it a “vTax” and said it would keep charging by CPU.

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